Haverford College alumni have played an important role in the development of photography since its co-inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, announced its birth in 1839. A new exhibition in the Atrium Gallery of Marshall Fine Arts Center on campus celebrates alumni contributions to the field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Haverford College Alumni Photographers of the Real features photographs, manuscripts, and related works by John G. Bullock (Class of 1874), Maxfield Parrish (Class of 1892), and siblings George (Class of 1884), William (Class of 1893), and Mary Vaux Walcott.

All five of photographers in the exhibit were birthright Quakers born in either Philadelphia or its environs; and they were nurtured by Philadelphia culture and its traditions. Bullock was one of the chief proponents of photography as a fine art. By virtue of his memberships in Philadelphia Photographic Society and the Photo-Secession under the leadership of Alfred Stieglitz, Bullock played a major role in the establishment of the institutional infrastructure for the promotion locally, nationally, and internationally of photography as a fine art form. The Vaux brothers and their sister used photography to document Philadelphia and the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Their scientific studies of glaciers were pioneering, and continues to be relevant today due to increasing concerns regarding climate change. Parrish was an artist best known for his illustrations in the Philadelphia-based Saturday Evening Post. Though he originally trained as an illustrator, Parrish used photographs as study aids for his artwork. He made beautiful images based on a keen observation of the landscape, light and form. Parrish’s original photographic prints are rare and seldom exhibited.

This exhibition is made possible by recent gifts to Haverford’s Fine Art Photography Collection by Tina Vaux McCauley, a descendant of the Vaux family; Robert Bishop, a descendant of John G. Bullock; and by a recent acquisition of Maxfield Parrish’s paper photographs and glass slides.

For more information, contact Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor of Humanities William Earle Williams at wwilliam@haverford.edu.